


Firebirds sing by night

by Liaeling



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 03:04:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3311531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liaeling/pseuds/Liaeling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And only now, with the waves at our right and the line of dark trees on our left did I realize that Armand wasn’t that different from the same child I had once loved and would always love."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firebirds sing by night

**Author's Note:**

> A sudden inspiration hit me and this is the result. First time writing for this fandom.  
> For the ones interested, I wrote this while actually listening to Stravinsky's Firebird, if you're not familiar with it I highly recommend listening to it. Also, the title comes from the verse that inspired Stravinsky to write the music.
> 
> This is Louis' POV as you shall easily guess, I hope.

The wind was blowing off the shore, bringing the cold north feeling of winter particular to the season that slowly but steadily had begun to fall… _again_. We were walking down the rocky beach of the eastern part of England, somewhere between one town or another. Little cities, as my companion liked to call the modern dwelling communities that had been pushed by the industrial revolution to a rapid acceleration in productivity chains and utter desolation of mind. The full moon was shining on the surface of the same sea that once brought Vikings and Saxons, diseases and massacres. The waves kept crashing against the rocks, creating something akin to the modern music of Stravinsky, the same one we had heard in the premiere at the Paris Opera back in 1910, around the same time the first radios had started being used by the general public.

I hated that music, I hated the desolation, desperation and utter beauty it transmitted. “The Firebird”, that was the piece we heard back in Paris, the same night I had silently promised myself I would never come back to the city that gave me hope and took it from me, the same city that had taken Claudia from me and given me my new companion. That night I didn’t utter a word but Armand must had read my open mind. We walked all night, stopping only at dawn to sleep inside an old church in the outskirts of the city.

And now, almost four years later the waves brought back that music. How fitting that it would come now when the looming shadow of a war was upon everything alive and prone to sorrow.

“You think too much” Armand whispered right by my side. I realized then and there that I hardly remembered the sound of his voice. The sensuous whisper that could lure and drive any creature, alive or alive in death, to utter concentration upon the meaning of the words. It had been so long since he had talked to me that now his voice struck me speechless. I suddenly remembered Claudia’s silence, her furtive glances.

In our wanderings, Armand would often stare straight past me, working his way around trees and the occasional road crossings we had to take in order to get… nowhere.

From the very start, I never understood why I was drawn irresistibly to him. Never for a moment had I thought I could forgive him for doing the things he had done to me, to Lestat, to Claudia, and more importantly, to himself. I guess in a way I pitied him. I pitied him for being the lost little soul he was, even more lost than myself and still not lost enough, strong enough to keep himself upright.

He would often stare… like Claudia did in her first years. Curiosity mingling with utter detachment, the contradictory condition of the child ripped from its world and thrown into an ironic existence. His eyes were hopeless voids in the angelic face preserved forever in the blood he took each night with a passionate cruelty he tried to cover up with soothing gestures. But I saw it, the cruelty of the alienated young man, the lack of empathy of the abused and abusive creature he was.

And only now, with the waves at our right and the line of dark trees on our left did I realize that Armand wasn’t that different from the same child I had once loved and would always love. The golden curls that I had held in my dead hands were never forgotten, but only now did I remember that I often did the same with Armand’s auburn curls without even thinking. The disturbing quality of her innocent face inset with two adult eyes wasn’t that different from Armand’s own. Her silence, her detachment, the almost childish cruelty in which she had taken life…

Armand was walking ahead of me now, his auburn hair let loose in the cold wind. Forever carved in the marble countenance of a young man he looked surreal in his sure step, almost to the point of striking fear upon my troubled soul.

I wasn’t afraid of him, I was afraid _for_ him.

He suddenly stopped walking right in the middle of my realization and I stopped with him. We must had stood there for at least an hour, the full moon playing with the world by hiding between quick passing clouds. I was painfully aware of his presence. For once the attraction he exerted was half forgotten in his immobility. I was conscious for a moment that he was _dead_ and I was too. We were two dead beings standing on the shores of a deep sea none of us knew, aware of the coldness yet immune to it.

“Somewhere across this sea war is beginning” he whispered with his back still to me, not even bothering to raise his voice so he could be heard above the noise of the waves and the lashing wind. He didn’t have to and that only made me more aware of my unnatural nature.

He slowly turned towards me, loose hair lashing across his almost immobile face. What I saw was a pale reflection of something I had once known should only belong in the coffin of a dead child, a real _dead_ child.

His lips curled in a painful smile. He just stared at me as though I knew nothing at all.

“Because you don’t. You know nothing at all. And this world that we walk together is just a painful reminder to you, a reminder of something you thought you once had yet never possessed. You think I can give you answers and yet you know I cannot. You think I can save you yet you think I need protection like the dead child you see in me”.

He had said all this without a hint of warmth, like a dead bird with its broken neck that could suddenly start singing without life coursing through its body.

“You think you can save me, Louis. You think this while being aware of the fact that I am past saving. And while being aware too, that this applies to you even better than to me or any other creature you have tried to save before”.

I longed for the silence now. I longed for the noise of it, the purity of it. I only wanted him to turn around and keep walking like before, without his dead eyes staring straight at and straight past me. I felt repulsion and delight in his presence. I felt the human spirit in me rotting away in its funeral clothes, stagnant and breathless.

“You can’t bear my silence yet you can’t stand my words. Everyone longs for a child that talks, but only hope to listen to senseless words. The child that starts to sound coherent is doomed to be pushed away”.

He turned around as slowly as he had done before, leaving me staring at his well-known back, the same that looked weakly defeated in its barely perceptible drop of the shoulders. He started walking again, pushing each feet away from the sand between the rocks around the beach, like any mortal would do, but with singular gracefulness that only he could unconsciously produce.

I heard gunfire somewhere in the wind. The waves kept crashing and I heard the pitiless sound of artillery working its way across sea and land. I knew then that Armand was walking towards a resting place he had probably been preparing for us.

War had started and we would sleep through it. We would sleep and dream of something we could call life, something we knew full well was nothing but an illusion.


End file.
